feminism, motherhood, writing

You can trust the Daily Mail to be the champion of the downtrodden worker, fearlessly challenging privilege wherever it may be found. Today, it’s the turn of lower-paid staff on the BBC’s Today programme to benefit from the paper’s razor-sharp analysis of injustice.

Why, it is asked, should “rank-and-file” workers bear the cost of vast pay increases to female presenters, intended to “close the show’s gender pay gap”? Since reducing the pay of male presenters such as John Humphrys and Nick Robinson is apparently unthinkable, shouldn’t we be asking whether an “outrageous growth” in pay for their female peers is at all wise?

After all, while sexism isn’t particularly pleasant, partial equality isn’t equality at all. When the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider, why worry about whether women at the top are receiving less than their male counterparts? You can make a tiny minority of women as overpaid as a tiny minority of men – but doesn’t that still leave the most basic injustice intact?